Rent the Runway partners with Google Cloud

Rent the Runway, which allows users to rent, subscribe, or buy designer apparel and accessories, has migrated its entire IT infrastructure and e-commerce platform to Google Cloud to meet the growing needs of its business.

The move will allow the e-commerce platform to enhance the experience for its customers with improved platform reliability, while also aligning infrastructure to business needs, meaning that the platform is more agile during peak shopping times.

Rent the Runway added that the move to Google Cloud would also mean that the business would remove limitations on its ambitions, allowing it to build on a more flexible and scalable infrastructure.

Commenting on why they chose Google Cloud technologies, a Rent the Runway spokesperson said: “At Rent the Runway, we pioneered a new business model for fashion rental and subscription. At the time, the appropriate off-the-shelf technology did not exist. So, we created the technology to enable fashion rentals and reverse logistics to power the business.

“Gaining elasticity with our infrastructure would help us continue to deliver on our customer promise and maintain sound economics. Traditional hosting didn’t provide the agility we needed for scaling over the long term, but the ability to quickly spin up new service instances and supporting technology did. Moving to Google Cloud enables us to spread our software assets across a broader array of physical hardware and increase our overall availability."

The move to Google Cloud will also enhance their sustainability pledges, added Rent the Runway, as the business is now running on Google Cloud’s carbon-neutral infrastructure.

Rent the Runway added: “We are also able to advance several of our environmental sustainability goals by moving to the Cloud, something that is a key priority of our business. The elastic nature of the technology ensures we’re only using the resources required to run our business. “Google Cloud has superior efficiency (2x more than a typical data centre) and shares our commitments to decarbonization through 100 percent renewable energy and waste diversion.”